Green Wars! EVs are the Future but right now its the CONVERTIBLE

If this statement were to be made 10 years back people would have laughed as there were other technologies like hydrogen fuel cell Etc which were perceived to be equally good. Indian government seems to have set the cat among the pigeons with its electric push. EESL the greening arm of the government has just last month procured 500 electric Tigor EVs from Tata motors against stiff competition from rivals such as Mahindras for the 10,000 electric vehicle contract.

So what is the status of the industry now?

Since vehicles usually last for more than 20 years it is the right time for manufacturers to launch vehicles with CONVERTIBLE features. That is with a chassis and body of a petrol vehicle with a petrol engine but with features to convert it to Electric Vehicle in case of need sometime in 2030 or later.

Government Mandate

What is more the government should mandate say after about 2022 or 23 to compulsorily sell vehicles with this convertible feature.

MGNREGS Revamp

MGNREGS is a money guzzler. In this helicopter money scheme all is going waste. Better thing would be to provide income supplement to villagers/sub-urban dwellers via-aadhaar linked methods. What is needed is registration of labour contractors. Just expand the MGNREGS to any job that any organization wants done. Track the payments the organization makes to the person and supplement the income by suitable percentages. The theme or goal here should be to encourage people to stay employed no matter how menial the income. Organizations will be more than happy to keep their employees as they need to pay less. This way govt can partner with the employment providers and create a win win situation for all by better tracking of money flows and income. Enablers and a key requirement would be electronic payments of salaries and wages all across the country.

Retro fitting privacy into aadhaar

Aadhaar project has invited wrath of the privacy advocates and civil society for being lax on security and privacy of individuals. The supreme court is expected to give a verdict tomorrow on whether privacy is a fundamental right or not. Once the supreme court asserts that privacy is a fundamental right although it has not found mention in the constitution(by oversight), the case against the aadhaar validity will continue to be heard by the three judge bench.

Many well intentioned people have suggested mitigation measures such as destroying the aadhaar database and arming people with biometrics laden smart cards. Many privacy fearing people have blocked their biometric authentication by locking it.

Very few people have seen it as a technology problem that can be addressed using technological measures. One such Idea that I have suggested in online forums is to make it harder for companies to correlate databases and building profiles of individuals based on the aadhaar number.
Addendum: Recent press reports suggest that UIDAI is looking at providing dummy numbers to companies to seed in their databases which will ensure uniqueness yet preserving privacy as these dummy numbers cannot be used to find the real aadhaar number.

I have found interesting avenues for research on differential privacy and how correlation of databases can be avoided.

Visa Ban Good for Indians

H1B visa ban for Indians is good for Americans as well as Indians. Indians will no more be used as a punching bag. Till recently america used to import software laborers from India so that they could be used for target practice in shooting incidents. This will not be the case anymore.

Digital India and the unforeseen uses of aadhaar

With increasing importance being attached to aadhaar by the Modi government, it has made aadhaar the fulcrum of the Digital India Movement. Apart from the use of aadhaar in accurately identifying beneficiaries of government welfare some amazing and unforeseen uses of aadhaar number have come to the fore.
Pesky little uses of aadhaar are emerging from unforeseen directions....

1) Renting Bikes: No one would believe but duplicate copy of the aadhaar cards are being used to rent bikes in GOA. I saw with my own eyes how a person rented a bike in GOA with just a tattered aadhaar card(number).

2) OPD Appointments at Govt Hospitals: You might not have thought about this but your government is on an overdrive to ease the appointment process in hospitals. What is more, It has even thought of calling you(over phone) in case your wife delivered a baby to inquire about the child's health and inform that your wife's account has been credited with 6k rupees as maternity benefit for delivering in an hospital. Also confirm gender of the child and start the process of authorizing benefits in case of girl child. All this due to aadhaar.

3) Survey of India Maps:
Survey of India first published maps in 1793 and since has digitized maps of the country side. The maps are available for download for anyone using aadhaar number only.

4) Aadhaar linked Motor Insurance/Driving License/Vehicle Registration:
This will soon be on its way. Thirty percent of the driving licenses in India are found to be fake or duplicate with every person having at-least two or more of those. It is also a very tedious task to solicit insurance for motor vehicles esp two-wheeler. With aadhaar linking of vehicle registrations and driving licenses the government will be in a position to map all insurance policies to vehicles on the road. It may also aid law enforcement if all vehicles on road are accounted for.

5) Aadhaar linked land/property registration:
This is expected to be a step in mapping assets of the people to their rightful owners. People who cannot fight for their rights or economically weak will benefit if land and property titles are clear, legitimate and pucca.

6) Aadhaar linking of PAN/bank accounts:
This use case involves linking aadhaar with bank accounts and IT returns. People who honestly pay taxes are expected to benefit as the dishonest will fall into the tax net. In future anyone with the aadhaar number only should be able to file tax returns.

Aadhaar is an excellent security question !!!!

Despite the hype and hoopla about aadhaar and its dangers, I would still recommend the government to expand its role to two new applications. One for Aadhaar linking of mobile connections and other for aadhaar linking of Voter IDs.

But using it to force kids to enroll and/or deny mid day meals is taking it to the extreme. That kids do not like to eat more than 60 grams per day of cooked food in govt schools is the real lament.

Amid all this.... we are definitely missing the woods for the bushes. Aadhaar can serve as an excellent way of restoring someone access to his or her online account/digital identity. Aadhaar can easily check if the person authenticating is alive or not. This and the fact that aadhaar authentication relies on biometrics which does not change much over the life of a person, may be used as a final adjudication of whether the person is who he/she claims to be.

If a person is aadhaar authenticated and immediately is given an option to set a password for his account in any website/service or app, then subsequent aadhaar authentication might just be possible with passwords instead of biometrics. Everyone by now would have learnt about the biometric lock that aadhaar(UIDAI) has come up for the benefit of all those who would not like their biometric authentication without their consent. The problem with biometric locking is that it just shuts out all future biometric authentications and would need biometric authentication itself to unlock the lock.

Many businesses are already game for using aadhaar for a variety of services. Microsoft, shaadi.com to name a few are already using it.

Majority of the Indian population being illiterate may not be able to remember passwords and prove who they are to any of the e-services. But a minority of the people might be willing to lock their biometrics and opt for a password-instead-of-aadhaar-auth(or whatever you may call it) kind of system.

Now the aadhaar authentication system is built on a black box which does only authentications. UIDAI is least interested in what you are authenticating for. The authentication-user-agency asking for your biometrics may use your biometrics only once according to Aadhaar bill passed recently. But nothing stops them from illegitimately storing the biometrics and misusing it at a later date.

So the importance of biometric lock is very significant. Some activists have even suggested biometric locking by default for all aadhaar holders. In this context password-instead-of-aadhaar-auth might be of significant use for the upwardly mobile.

The least the government could do is to start a service for storing the password-instead-of-aadhaar-auth as an all encompassing social security key. A key which opens the gates for someones social benefits while protecting them from unnecessary biometric authentications.

If the government is to trust a mere password instead of full blown authentication, it has to be sure that the person is literate and has made an informed choice of using the password-instead-of-aadhaar-auth.

The India stack has a consent mechanism which allows biometric authentications from stored files but there is very little clarity on this right now.

Since several years UIDAI has been trying to convince biometric device suppliers to make use of keys supplied by the UIDAI. This feature would allow UIDAI to disable any biometric device or group of such devices should it suspect that they are being misused.

The future is all bright for the aadhaar and it remains to be seen how much of this path breaking technology sees uptake across the world. For Indians it has already become their AADHAAR(Support).

Pathetic e-service portal of LIC

Life insurance Corporation of India true to its name is a public sector behemoth. It is years behind the competition in terms of selling online policies. I am a customer of LIC and have enrolled policies in their e-service portal. The portal neither suggests me any new policies I can buy nor provides a way of buying new policies.
I am sure millions of LIC customers are using the portal for paying(grudgingly) for pathetic services. Hopeless is an understatement. The website a few snapshots of which I have included is woefully short of "zing"...

Here is the dinosaur era link to pay premium online:

This is the welcome page of the e-service portal with bullshit and useless links.

The opening page itself talks about "kanoon" and wants me to add policies. But I want new policy baba.
If you are confused and dying to purchase a life insurance from LIC online and hope to purchase an insurance before dying for the benefit of your loved ones... Like, comment below or still better tweet this post and tag the prime minister or the minister of electronics & IT. That is the best way to bring about change. Yes... I have heard so many stories and fables about how responsive they are. Try it.

Justice delayed is Justice denied

(Excerpts from the book rebooting India, more such extracts to follow)

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst

-Aristotle

At risk of stating the extremely obvious, the Indian judicial system is in trouble. By any measure you choose, our judiciary is a woeful under performer, whether it is in the number of judges and courts available to us, or the speedy disposal of cases placed before them. We have only ten to fifteen judges per million people, and our judge-to-population ratio is among the lowest in the world. As of 2014, the total number of pending cases across India was a staggering 30 million. If the judiciary at its existing strength were to roll up its sleeves and tackle the herculean task of resolving all the cases pending across the country, Andhra Pradesh High Court Judge V.V. Rao estimated it would take them 320 years to clear the backlog. A few years ago, Delhi Chief justice A. P Shah admitted that the Delhi High Court was lagging behind by 466 years; in an attempt to clear up its caseload, the court decreased the average time spent hearing a case to a little over five minutes.

Even five minutes in court would be a welcome relief for the 3,00,000 inmates of India's prisons who languish in custody while waiting for their case to be heard. Their numbers are growing steadily, and many of them are either illiterate or poorly educated. If their case is to be heard by a higher court- as in the case of an appeal-they're in for another endless wait, since it takes an estimated fifteen to twenty years for a case to wend its way from the lower courts all the way up to the supreme court. No wonder, legal cases in India often become family heirlooms, with the children and grand children of the litigants faithfully continuing to fight for their family's cause long after the original complainants are dead and gone.

Sanction 5000 rupee overdraft to every aadhaar linked Jan Dhan account

5000 rupee loans were promised to jandhan account holders. Banks were using their discretion in sanctioning the loans. A promise is a promise. UPA it could be recalled had promised to give 100 rupees to every person who enrolls for aadhaar. The promise was never kept in view of the precarious fiscal situation then.

Now, After Demonetization banks are full of cash and people are dying of cashless-ness. This situation has arisen because only a few have large amounts of cash. Poor don't even have minimum balance, how will they withdraw money. The government should ready a scheme to give incentive by either letting people avail 5000 rupee loans in their aadhaar linked accounts electronically or let them apply in banks for the promised Overdraft to everyone.
Back of envelop calculations show that this will lead to re-monetisation upto 1.25 lakh crore if every one of the 25 crore jandhan account holder uses the OD facility.

BBPS- All Bills Single Day Deadline

As the name suggests "Bharat Bill Payment System" is a noble and grandiose mission, a solution looking for problems. Sometime ago there was a committee of learned men which calculated that on the whole our countrymen pay more than 20 lakh crore amount in bills to utilities or service providers every year.

It beats me as to how regulatory diktat can solve problems associated with electronic payments. How will people take to electronic payments if you make them visit a kiosk? Even if there is some value addition won't it be better if customers themselves acquire digital skills. BBPS looks more like a solution searching for a problem. Several sites mention that banks would like to charge a small amount for the convenience provided due to the service. If I may chip in my suggestion to the already voluminous recommendations, I would like to get rid of payments on various days and pay only on one day of my choice. I would also like to have a "Single Deadline Payment".... which can be called All Bills Single Day Deadline.

I am completely exhausted of paying the following people monthly on different days:

Telecom Provider

Electricity Provider

Water Service

Gas or LPG service

Insurance Companies

Home EMIs
DTH bill
etc etc etc....

Here is some information from various sites:

History:

RBI’s plan to implement an ‘anytime anywhere’ centralized payment system is based on a report submitted by the GIRO (Government Internal Revenue Order) Advisory Group. GIRO Advisory Group (GAG) was constituted by the RBI in October 2013, under the chairmanship of Prof. Umesh Bellur, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay to implement a national GIRO-based Indian Bill Payment System.  The panel had recommended a mechanism for centralized bills payment system in India, mainly by laying out 2 organizations: 

• Bharat Bill Payment Services (BBPS) 
• Bharat Bill Payment Operating Units (BBPOUs)

What is it Exactly?

As per the framework, a customer will have a single location—physical or electronic—where she can pay bills such as for electricity, telephone, water, gas, and direct-to-home television. There will be instant confirmation once the payment is made. Payments can be either made in cash or through any of the various electronic modes of payment.
(While I am all for convenience of the customer.... It beats me what new thing the BBPS is bringing to the table... What problem it is trying to solve)

Its time for Turant Aadhaar

Turant in Hindi translates to Instant. Aadhaar enrollments have crossed 110 crore(1.1 billion). It is now time for aadhaar enrollments to be made only in PECs(Permanent Enrollment Centers). If that happens and since aadhaar biometrics collected could be instantly transmitted to the UIDAI offices(CIDR-Common Identities Data Repository) We could very easily have instant aadhaar generation.

This implies people need not have to wait for two-three months to get the aadhaar number generated. They could as well walk out of the PEC with newly made aadhaar card in hand.

Usurious Insurance Companies the Reliance way of Life

Insurance is a subject matter of solicitation. Meaning it cannot be sold.

Despite this lack of understanding among agents makes them sell insurance as a marketable product. And agents in their desire for commissions sometimes choose a wrong person to "TARGET" as a customer. As a consequence a bitterness and bad blood causes people to go without insurance even when they need it.

A simple example is a person just starting his career. An agent comes to him with a life insurance policy proposal. The singleton does not have any dependents and his old parents have not yet retired. So there is no obligation or necessity for a life insurance. Or take the case of a working professional who is made to invest in an investment cum life insurance policy when the necessity is only for investment which can be done even in all the saving schemes such as RD(recurring deposit),FD(fixed deposit) or PPF(public provident fund).

This story is about akkamma(name changed to protect privacy) who serves as a domestic help. She got married and has a daughter. An agent approaches her with a proposal to invest in a high end child policy by Reliance Life insurance. Neither the agent nor akkamma realize the true purpose of taking out a life insurance policy. The family income of akkamma and her husband does not cross 20k rupees per month even when there is lot of work. She quit her job of domestic help and started Ironing clothes instead. The work leaves her exhausted. The agent convinces her to take out a policy for which she has to pay 6 thousand every six months. After some 18 years when the girl child achieves majority the policy would give her some money. Problems such as ill-health due to pneumonia left akkamma with little to save and she had to borrow money to pay for the insurance. Since two years the policy has not been renewed while the money that  she paid till now has come to 60 thousand rupees. If she does not pay 24000 rupees she might lose a large part of the money she has invested.

These kind of stories never end in my country and the government comes out with several insurance schemes for the poor. The problem is lack of awareness. While private insurance companies attract agents who have only their commission in mind true sufferers are the common man who does not get the right guidance or financial saving instrument for weathering the rough times. Life is made miserable by the greed of a few people.